Re: Which BSD?

From: Rudolf Polzer (denshimeiru-sapmctacher_at_durchnull.de)
Date: 11/07/03

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    Date: 7 Nov 2003 05:36:41 GMT

    Scripsit illa aut ille »jpd« <read_the_sig@do.not.spam.it>:
    > Rudolf Polzer wrote:
    > > Scripsit ille »David Douthitt« <ssrat@mailbag.com>:
    > >> Note that none of the BSDs offer a slick user-friendly graphical
    > >> "geewhiz" installation. However, if you can install Slackware or
    > >> Gentoo you can certainly install any of the BSDs.
    > >
    > > BTW, is there a Gentoo-like (Any)BSD install process?
    >
    > I don't know that. I do know that the FreeBSD installer works very
    > well indeed. The NetBSD installer looks a bit less spiffy (at least when
    > I last looked at it) but it works equally well.

    As I installed NetBSD, the installer worked a bit unexpectedly. It "forgot"
    to create file systems on the partitions and then committed a deadly sin:
    it got error messages and immediately overwrote them with its dialog
    box which didn't contain more information than that an error has occurred.

    > As do the ports/pkgsrc systems on both.

    They work really fine.

    > > The only thing I
    > > liked about sysinstall from FreeBSD was the partitioner, the rest was a
    > > PITA. Just because the mirror I chose was missing the package index
    > > file, it tried over twenty times to download that index file: five times
    > > for each package it wanted to install. If I had pressed ^C, I'd probably
    > > have had to start over.
    >
    > But you didn't try, did you?

    I hadn't known if already "enough" was installed. Not even Perl was
    there.

    > I was helping someone netinstall FreeBSD 4.9 this week and it bombed
    > halfway. In hindsight due to a loose cable. Luckily it already had a
    > bootable kernel and /stand/sysinstall installed. So, what to do?
    > Launch /stand/sysinstall and just re-request installing the binary
    > distribution. After that, continue as usual.
    >
    > There is no difference in the resulting system when installing only base,
    > rebooting into installed system and continue configuring through sysinstall
    > compared to trying to do it in one shot. It's just harder to fsck up.

    But for this you need to know how the FreeBSD installer works. Typical
    Linux installers make the system bootable in the very last step, and
    because it was the first FreeBSD system I installed, I couldn't know
    there's this possibility.

    In case of FreeBSD's installer: somebody should just put a "choose
    another mirror" button in the couldn't-get-file error message.

    > > After a long long time, I was finally able to choose another mirror. But
    > > such installers suck. Gentoo's installer is /bin/sh - it at least does
    > > what I want it to do.
    >
    > *shrug* Try ``accidentally'' choosing a mirror that just happens to be
    > down with gentoo and see if you still like it that much. How well can
    > you recover from a half-way installed system?

    No problem since normally the files needed for bootstrapping are extracted
    from a single tarball first. So in this case, just feed wget with another
    argument to get the stage1 tarball (which is, however, normally included
    on any Gentoo CD).

    In the case of Gentoo, the worst is that you need to use vi to change
    /etc/make.conf to change the mirror. 

    -- 
You're thinking in Japanese!?! If you must think, DO IT IN GERMAN!!!
                                                        S. Asuka Langley
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